


They Just Went, Unheard

by youwilllovemylaugh



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:29:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youwilllovemylaugh/pseuds/youwilllovemylaugh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been three years since Will was wrongfully arrested for the murders Hannibal committed. It's been two since he's seen Alana Bloom.</p><p>Title from "Lady Adelaide" by Ben Gibbard</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Will looks in the mirror one last time, adjusting his tie, tugging at the sleeves of his best blazer, straightening his collar for the fifth time. When he checks the buttons on his white button-down for the third time, Winston barks at him as if to say, _Alana won't like it if you're late._

"You're right, buddy," Will says, squatting to pet the dog between his ears. He nuzzles the little place between Winston's eyebrows with the pad of his thumb, and the dog closes his eyes. "I better get going," he says, folding his hands between his knees and staring into Winston's brown, expressive eyes.

 _You're ready for it,_ he seems to say, and Will is inclined to believe him. It has been almost two years since he last saw her, nearly three since he's worked with the FBI. He's been through countless psych evals, visited more hospitals and specialists than he cares to remember - some criminal, some not. Eventually they dropped the charges - the FBI's halfhearted prosecution of him didn't stand a chance against his well-evidenced and vehemently-argued insanity plea. Their argument only weakened when some of their evidence turned out to be fabricated - a startling find that still occasionally haunts Will.

If it hadn't been for that slip up, suspicious as it was, he wouldn't be standing here, his criminal record abolished, his mind working like a well-oiled machine, preparing to take Alana Bloom out for dinner.

"I'll see you all later," he says to the dogs, who wag their tails and whine in turn. He smiles fondly at them, turns on the radio by the front door so they won't feel alone while he's out, and locks his front door.

His palms sweat as he fumbles with his keys, unlocks his new Acura sedan, and turns out of his driveway in the direction of town. He's nervous, of course - seeing Alana is all he's thought about, the reason he's worked so hard to improve himself after he lost his teaching license. And he has so much to show her - or, at least he thinks so. Now, at least, he isn't losing track of time, or dissociating in the middle of conversations, or hallucinating, or sleepwalking miles and miles away from home in his pajamas in the middle of the night. Now, he sleeps soundly, cuddled up next to Winston, who snores softly all through the night.

He wonders if he'll have to kick Winston out tonight – not that the dog would mind sparing his space for the woman who fed him for almost a year – but Will banishes that thought as soon as it passes through his mind. Will Graham has learned to know better than to be so blindly optimistic.

He arrives at the restaurant fifteen minutes late despite himself. Feeling rushed and imbalanced and harried as all hell, he bursts into the dining area like a quiet gust of wind, running a hand through his hair and glancing wildly around at the different faces at tables, until he alights on the only one that matters.

And then the pleasant din of mealtime chatter falls silent. The edges of his vision fade dangerously, and for a minute he freaks out, thinking _oh no, it's happening again, of course, the first goddamn time in two goddamn years, and it happens NOW,_ but then he realizes that he’s not losing it, he’s not fading out. He’s tuning in.

Alana sits at a table in the center of the dining area, one hand worrying at the cuticles of the other, looking away from him. She is the woman of his thoughts - radiant and elegant as ever - and every inch of him wants to run right over to her and engage her in some kind of conversation - he wants to see her come alive.

But he can't run over because it's not that kind of place, so he strides carefully over, the oddest mix of confident and anxious, and says, “Hello.”

Alana looks up at him. Her eyes are dark and haunted at first, troubled by something he can’t place, and then her face brightens, and Will can’t help but match her expression.

“I thought you’d never get here,” she says, standing up. She leans over and hugs him, presses her cheek to his, and he can smell the same scents he’s spent the last few days imagining. Rosewater, talcum powder, sunshine. He breathes in the scent, revels in the familiar smell. The embrace doesn’t last as long as he’d like.

“Traffic,” he lies. “And a solid case of the nerves,” he amends after a moment, waiting for Alana to sit before he pulls his own chair out.

“I can understand that,” Alana says, and smiles nervously at him. “But I got here fifteen minutes _early_.”

“Just another reason you’re better than me,” he says earnestly. He unfolds his cloth napkin and places it on his lap, takes a sip of his water, and clears his throat. Alana stares back at him, her smile both pleasant and pensive. It’s kind of unnerving – he can’t place her emotion, even though he’s trying, and that is weird.

So he says, “What’s on your mind?”

And her smile turns into a grimace, and Will’s heart breaks a little.

“It’s nothing.” He isn’t convinced, but she continues. “I’m a little . . . surprised to see you doing so well, is all.”

“It has been two years,” he says, but he can tell she needs more assurance than that. “I’ve been going to a therapist – not anyone affiliated with the FBI,” he clarifies, when he sees her shoulders tense and her eyes widen – “and no one affiliated with him, either.”

He doesn’t specify whom he refers to when he says _him._ They both know. In a cold place they’d both rather forget, they know.

“That’s great,” she says, but it sounds thin, reedy. “I’m really happy for you.”

He smiles back at her, and he allows himself to accept her words for true. It is quiet for a moment, while both of them stare off, Alana at the other diners, Will at her. He still can’t believe she agreed to come out with him, to meet him here, after everything that happened. It’s so _lucky_ , and if nothing else, luck has never been fond of Will Graham.

A waiter appears, and places two glasses and an ice bucket on their table. In the bucket is a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, out of which the waiter pours two half-glasses.

“Enjoy,” the waiter says elegantly, before leaving as silently as he’d come.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Alana says once the waiter is gone. “I thought for a minute that you’d be longer than you turned out to be, so I ordered this for us.”

“Not a problem,” Will assures her, and sips the wine tentatively. It has been so long since he’s had a drink – his psychologist had instructed him not to keep liquor in the house, as he’d grown so used to drinking it to escape his pain, or in a futile attempt to ground himself to the moment – that when the wine hits his tongue he’s actually surprised by its bite.

“Do you like it?” Alana asks, eyeing him.

He can’t think of a good way to say, _I shouldn’t be drinking this_ , so he just says, “Absolutely.”

The waiter strolls by again, and they make their requests – almond encrusted chicken with a cranberry compote for Alana, and a pork chop with a side of garlic mashed potatoes for Will. The waiter is gone again as quickly as he arrived, and they are plunged into silence.

After a moment, Alana asks, “How are the dogs?”

To which Will responds, “Doing well. They miss you, though.”

“Really?”

“Sure. You took care of them for almost a year – they know who you are, what you did for them when I couldn’t do it. They love you,” he says, and Alana’s smile widens.  “You should come by and see them sometime,” Will adds, and Alana shoots him a coy glance.

“Maybe I will,” she says, and a geyser of joy erupts in his stomach, lining his insides with a warm, comforting salve.

“I’d like that,” he says. “I’d like that a lot.”

“You know, something tells me I wouldn’t mind that either,” Alana says, and Will laughs, and it’s the happiest he’s been in a long time.

Silence shrouds them again, but Will isn’t so uncomfortable in it anymore. In fact, he welcomes it – he uses it to watch Alana, sipping her wine, staring at the little crumbs beneath the bread basket on their table, picking at her cuticles again. He’s about to reach out and stop her, take her hands in his and hold them, when she looks up at him and he knows instantly that she has something important to say.

“Yes?” he prompts after a moment of sitting under Alana’s fixed gaze, growing more and more anxious with each passing second.

“How do you feel, Will?” she asks, and her eyes crinkle around the corners. “I mean it really – how do you feel?”

He’s a little unsure of how to proceed. Her eye tell him that she doesn’t know what to expect him to say, but her hands, which are still worrying her cuticles, tell him she already knows it’s going to be bad news.

He’s happy he gets to tell her otherwise. He’s even a little glad he’ll have to fight her on the point – it gives him more of an opportunity to prove it to her.

“Honestly?” he prompts, and hides his smile when she gives him an apprehensive nod. “It’s been three months since they let me out of the hospital. I still remember that final day like it was yesterday – they told me I could go, that someone had paid for the upkeep of my house, that it would be ready and waiting for me when I got back. I signed the paperwork, flew through the exit examinations. The doctors wished me well. And I got in a taxi and I rode all the way home with my stomach in knots. I was worried that when I finally arrived on the old porch that everything would come crashing down – that everything I’d worked so hard to construct would come crashing down in a second. And I’d never felt sicker in my life.

“But I got there, and I saw the old place. I walked in the front door, expecting to be greeted by the old familiar noses and tail wags and excited barks – but instead I got silence. An eerie, unnerving silence.” He struggles with his words there, and, avoiding Alana’s fixed gaze, reaches for his wine glass to loosen his vocal cords. “The first night was awful. It had been years since I’d slept in my bedroom all by myself, without the literal dog pile curled up in the corner –” here, Alana laughs, and he smiles too, “– but I managed to fall asleep, in spite of how scared I was to do it.” The memory floods back to him. The dark room, the quiet sounds of the late winter gusts blowing through the empty lot behind his house. Suddenly, he is not in the warm, well-lit restaurant, but in the sinister dark of his bedroom, shivering under blankets that can’t seem to do their job. His breath catches in his throat – and just like that, he is brought back, he is sitting in the restaurant, in front of the incredible Alana Bloom, telling her the story of how he overcame the most significant fear he’s ever known: the fear of being alone.

“I woke up the next morning, and it was like none of it had ever happened. I was fine. I felt rested. The sun was shining in through the window, and even though it was quiet, it didn’t carry the same kind of insidiousness that it had the night before.” He smiles at the memory, at the resurgence of the same feeling of triumph that blooms in his chest as he recounts it. “And it’s been the same ever since.” He looks up then, and meets Alana’s eyes.

They have tears in them.

“No,” he murmurs, horror taking over his pride. “No, no, it’s not for all that,” he says, and before he knows what he’s doing, he is reaching over the table and taking her hands in his, covering her fidgeting fingers with his own uncharacteristically calm ones.

Alana sniffles. “Shit,” she mumbles, and she smiles, laughs a little. Will doesn’t know what to do, so he holds her hands. “I didn’t mean to cry. I . . . really don’t know what’s come over me, I –”

“Sshh,” Will says. He strokes her hands with his thumbs. “It’s not your fault. Clearly, it’s mine. He looks down at the table, at their hands. “I’ve said too much.”

“No,” Alana insists. Her intonation makes him look up, and he meets the familiar fierce blue eyes he used to know, the ones from three years ago, even longer. “Don’t misunderstand me – I am so, so happy for you.” She smiles. “Really. It is so, so good. This is so, so good.” She laughs again, and Will relaxes a bit. He is still holding her hands.

It takes her a minute, but she recovers. She eventually removes one of her hands from the tangle between them, to take a napkin to her eyes, to blow her nose in such an indelicate manner that Will can’t help but laugh at her. This is the Alana he knows – the person who isn’t afraid to be herself, who is tough and soft and frank, and who hides her fears behind the most incredible façade.

He marvels, though, at her marked ability to crash through that façade at will. To transform into a raw, unapologetic human being before his eyes. It is the one thing – the best thing – that differentiates her from the only other person he’s known to act behind a carefully crafted person suit.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says finally, and Will smiles so hard he thinks his face is going to split in two.

The waiter arrives with their entrées, and Will has to fight back a momentary queasiness. The plate is dressed beautifully – complete with garnish and side dish, and without a rogue drop of sauce tainting the rims of the plate – and that is exactly the problem. It reminds him too much of those countless dinners, those dozens upon dozens of meals eaten in the cold, carefully classy dining room of his former psychologist and friend.

Will’s psychologist has recommended that he continue eating meat, in spite of his past. The woman, as far from his previous psychologist as he could get, understood that the idea of eating meat was about the last thing about which Will wanted to think, but he had to get used to it in order to ensure that he not sustain any long-term trauma. To his credit, he sees Alana hesitate a moment before slicing off her first piece of chicken.

She catches him watching her eat, and smiles nervously. He cuts into his pork chop, dips it in the marinade with which they’ve provided him, and chews. To anyone else, it would seem he was savoring the first bite of a delicious meal. In reality, it is all he can do to keep from vomiting all over the table and swearing off meat for the rest of his life.

They eat in silence. It’s comfortable enough, but both parties are aware of the other’s pathology – or, at least Will thinks so. He’s acutely aware of the sounds of Alana’s fork and knife on her plate, the subtle sounds of her teeth scraping along the fork as she removes the chicken from its tines.

And soon, they are done. And with a casual, confident flick of his fingers, Will hails the waiter and pays for dinner so quickly Alana cannot make a peep in protest.

“What if I’d wanted dessert?” she asks, and for a second Will’s face drops, an icy finger tickles the pit of his stomach, all before Alana giggles. “I didn’t; it’s fine.”

And then he cocks an eyebrow, and he’s so intensely glad he didn’t ask if she wanted dessert.

It means he can take her home faster.

The waiter returns the bill, and he pretends not to be shocked at the number at its foot, and he signs his name while wondering how the hell he’s going to pay for this with no job and hardly any savings, and then he looks back up at Alana and all of the worry is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Will opens the door for Alana with a flourish, and she is greeted by the dogs, who wag their tails and whine excitedly. It has been so long since she’s been over to see them that she is surprised by how ecstatic they seem to have their old caretaker back in their presence. Winston is the only one who seems to pay more attention to Will than her, but she understands. Winston has always been Will’s dog, and Will’s dog alone.

“Hey, babies!” she says, immediately leaning down and opening her arms to them, letting her purse fall off her shoulder, scrunching her face up as the dogs lick her face. She giggles at them, makes sure to pet each one on the head at least once, and then rises from her kneeling position. As she stands, she notices Will watching her, his fingers nuzzling Winston’s head, both of them smiling like a pair of idiots.

“What?” she asks, pushing past the dogs and shutting Will’s front door behind her. “Never seen a girl pet a dog before?”

He laughs, and takes an apprehensive step forward. Alana marvels at this – in all the years she’s known Will, this is the best she’s ever seen him. He doesn’t make a move on her, but rather just stands at a safe distance, staring into her eyes with his own calm, pensive ones.  She remembers when she could feel the tumult inside him, when she almost felt nauseated just looking in his eyes because, with one glance, she could see just how violently his mind roiled, how the encephalitis had boiled him from the inside out.

And now she sees none of it. She sees nothing of which to be afraid, nothing to make her fear him, or fear for herself. She sees nothing in his eyes that reviles her, nothing that makes her question her safety in his presence.

So she leans up, and she kisses him. It takes a minute, but she feels his hands creep up her blouse, over her arms, up to either side of her face, where his thumbs caress her face as his lips open hers. And then she feels him laugh into her mouth, and she pulls back. He pulls her back into him, but she keeps him from kissing her again, and asks, “What’s the matter?”

Will massages circles with his thumbs into the small of her back, holding her like he’ll never let go. Alana can’t believe the way this feels – she can’t be bothered to count the number of futile dates and hopeless, fruitless encounters she’s had in the last three years, none of which could ever have lived up to this feeling. She thinks of all the horrible kisses, the atrocious conversations she’s had with practical strangers, trying to search for something to balm the ache in her chest that panged whenever she remembered Will Graham, sitting in a hospital bed somewhere, all alone, healing.

That’s when Alana realizes. She knows exactly what’s the matter, exactly what is making Will laugh. So she rakes her eyes over him, over the dinner jacket and the white button-down, over his unshaven chin and meeting his blue eyes behind his oval-framed GI glasses. And then she laughs, too.

He kisses her this time, more aggressively than before, but she stops him again, takes his face in her hands and runs her thumbs over his stubbly cheeks, gently runs her fingers through his hair. She removes his glasses and sets them on the table beneath the mirror by the front door. And then she walks into him, pushes him into his house, down onto the couch in the living room, where she falls on top of him, kissing him furiously.

She is breathless, the front of her wrap dress untied, baring the bra she wore specially for this evening, when she leans back and says, “Stop, for a moment.”

And Will does. Her hands are on his chest, palms flat against the crisp white button-down, and he is staring up at her, his head propped awkwardly against the armrest of his couch. She is straddling him, and she can’t quite remember how she got here – not in the scary, lost-time sense, but in the grander scheme of things. Three years ago, she had stood at the edge of a cliff, facing a long fall to an uncertain terrain – one covered in snow. She’d had to beat down her feelings for Will, had to push him away to preserve herself. She had to ignore every instinct that told her to jump his bones and not let him get away, and she had to force herself to comply in order to not be sucked down with him.

Such a part of her feels so shitty for that. So, so shitty. But now, watching as Will’s face falls from one of tentative elation to quiet worry, his blue eyes deepening with each passing second, she can tell that he isn’t the same person. He isn’t the man who had gotten so lost in his mind he had trouble getting himself out again.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks then, and it’s the final straw for Alana. Before, when Will’s empathic abilities had run rampant, he wouldn’t have needed to ask her to speak her mind. He would have just known.

So here she is again, standing at the edge of the same cliff, looking down over its lip. But now it is summer, and the snow is gone, and she can see at the bottom a deep river that will catch her fall, and Will, smiling up at her, treading water.

She says nothing, just smiles. She unbuttons Will’s shirt, one button at a time, and he sits up, catching her waist in his hands. She rocks her hips back and forth – it only takes a few passes before she can feel him pressing though their layers, feel herself heat up in anticipation.

She reaches down, but Will stops her from unbuckling his belt.

“Can you tell me what you’re thinking, please?” Will asks, grabbing her wrists in his hands. He squeezes them, which makes her meet his eyes. They are pleading, confused.

She swallows, measures his gaze. “I want you,” she says shakily. “I’ve wanted you for a long time.” She pauses despite herself, needing desperately to steady the quiver in her voice. “And now, I can have you.”

Alana feels a cold little spurt burst in her stomach, a tendril of fear that spreads to line her insides. She has never been afraid of confessing her feelings – not in recent memory. The last time she was afraid of telling a boy how she felt, she was nineteen, and losing her virginity to the beautiful film major who had promised her the world, only to break up with her only two weeks later.

She doesn’t have to wonder why she’s recalling this now. A part of her has always wondered what Will’s sexual history is like – if he’d ever been particularly successful, or if he’d been just as inept as she had been through high school, the first year and a half of college. It’s probably the latter, she guesses, and that’s why it matters. This is going to be important for both of them, way more important than anyone else.

Will holds her gaze a moment, and Alana feels precarious. She cannot get the image of plunging down the cliff out of her mind, of plummeting head first into a war zone.

And then Will kisses her again, and all she can see is the ground rushing up to meet her.

And then they take off their clothes, and all she can hear is the sound of the wind whistling in her ears, the soft _splash_ her body makes as it hits the river, the rush of the river around her ears.

And then she feels Will enter her, and all she can feel are his arms around her, lean and strong, and safe.

When it’s over, she lays on his chest, watching the ground shift across the room as her head bobs on his moving chest, up and down, up and down. It is nice to hear him breathing, to lie on top of him and hold him, too. It is all she’s wanted since she was placed in protective custody, and wondered if she’d be put in his care.

She snuggles in closer, and feels his arms wrap tighter around her torso. If she listens closely, she can hear his heart beating in his chest, a steady _ba-dum, ba-dum,_ _ba-dum_ that lulls her further and further into the unconscious. But she can’t sleep. She knows she can’t, knows she won’t be able to turn her mind off for quite a while.

So she leans up a bit, slowly, and watches Will’s face as she climbs off him, extracting her limbs from between his with the utmost care. The dogs aren’t around – either they cordoned themselves off in another room, or they’re hiding in the dark, asleep on the floor – and Alana counts this as a good thing. The last thing she needs is to step on somebody’s tail and send the whole house into a yelping, startled frenzy.

Picking her dress up off the floor, Alana wraps it around herself like a robe, and goes outside. Will’s property has always amazed her – there is so much land around his house that she’s sure the nearest neighbor is at least a quarter-mile away. In some ways, she’s surprised that he chose to stay here after being let off. Before he got treatment, he had come out here at night to close his mind off, to avoid running the risk of finding his way into someone else’s mind, and losing himself there.

But, then again, if he came out here to be himself, she can’t really blame him for wanting to stay. There were plenty of nights all those years ago that he would stay late at the office, or on site at an investigation, or he wouldn’t get home at all. And he’d leave food out for his dogs, and he’d stop in to check on things every once in a while, but he never came back for extended periods of time.

Usually, he’d just go to Dr. Lecter’s if he needed to get away.

She can’t help it – a shudder runs through her, followed by an unmatchable revulsion. Jack Crawford’s face swims in and out of focus as the revulsion wanes, and in its place blooms a horrid loathing. Jack, as much as he’d tried to “help,” had ultimately only ruined things for Will. In that fiasco, he had proven not only his lack of foresight, but also his unnerving inability to judge character. For such a high-level agent, Alana couldn’t help but wonder just how Jack had managed to keep his position for as long as he had with his limited set of skills.

Alana paces out onto the porch, watching her feet take one step at a time as she wears circles in the old wood. It is soft beneath her bare feet, and does not make her wary of splinters. Eventually, she finds herself standing at the top of the small staircase that leads out to the backyard, watching the sun rise over the distant evergreens that line the edge of the property.

 _Serene_. The word pops into her head like a bullet out of its chamber, and as soon as she acknowledges it, it is gone. She has not felt this at ease for a very, very long time. She tries to think of an example, a moment in time where her heart laid this still, where she did not feel quite so aware of every inch of skin that touched her clothes, touched the chair she sat upon. Nothing came to mind. Somehow, this didn’t bother her.

Alana wraps her dress tighter around herself, wishing for a blanket or a robe or something a little warmer, as the late May morning calls forth a chilly northern breeze. It’s strange for it to be this cold in May in northern Virginia, and Alana curls her toes up against the breeze, over the edge of the top stair.

And then a blanket falls on her shoulders, and she looks over her shoulder to find Will standing behind her, wearing boxers and a fisherman’s sweater.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, looking foggily at her through his glasses. Behind him, Winston pokes his nose out the door, smelling the air carried in by the breeze.

“It’s less of a ‘couldn’t’ and more of a ‘didn’t feel like it,’ ” she says, and he smiles from his place a safe few inches from her.

“I know the feeling,” he says with a rueful smile, and Alana laughs along with him. He sidles up next to her, folding his arms over his chest. He stands beside her, his elbow a solid inch from hers, and joins her in looking out over the property behind his house.

“They sold it, you know,” he says then, and Alana studies his face. The lines around his eyes are a little more pronounced, but his face is less tired, less sweaty, less green and sickly. He looks so much healthier, so much happier. But behind the hale façade, Alana sees a worry, buried deep in his blue eyes.

“This?” she asks after a moment, catching on. “They sold _this?_ ” She looks out over the property, the expansive backyard, edged by woods, opening up under the pinking early morning sky. The edges of the field are tinged golden by the rising sun.

“Yeah,” Will says. When Alana looks back up at him, she finds tears in his eyes. “The money for my recovery had to come from somewhere.”

Alana goes cold. Her fingers feel frozen, like they’ll never be able to uncurl from around her blanket again.

There is no arguing that. Will’s professor’s salary had been average at best, and it isn’t like his father made any kind of sustainable living – not that Will would have called him for help, anyway. Even in the direst of circumstances, Will would never stoop to asking for help. He’s too proud.

He wouldn’t even ask for help now. Instead, he’ll hole up in an apartment somewhere, or travel down to Florida and find a shitty, run-down place to rent for cheap so he could keep the dogs. He would try to disappear as best he could, so everyone would forget about him, and he could go on living without ever having to be vulnerable.

Alana remembers a time nearly three years ago, just a few weeks before Will had been arrested. Dr. Gideon had escaped from a transport van, and she had needed to be placed under protective custody, in case Gideon decided to make an appearance at her house.

But when Will showed up at her office instead of the agent meant to protect her, she had teased him.

_“Too bad. Would have been fun to cozy up with your dogs in front of a space heater.”_

And he’d taken it. Perhaps not lightly, but he’d taken it.

 _“You don’t need protective custody to cozy up with my dogs. Or me, for that matter. Just need a little more, uh,_ stability _on my part.”_

She’d tried to fix it, then. She’d put her hand on his cheek, looked into his eyes and tried to hide the longing that was mirrored in their eyes. He had been warm – she hadn’t known then what it’d meant, but looking back the pain of not pressing him harder only salted her wounds – and she let him dismiss it, saying only _“I run hot.”_

His words had driven spikes into her lungs even then, but she knew she’d been right to make him wait. His stability was essential – she had learned from so many previous relationships with wounded men with hooded eyes and hunched shoulders that she couldn’t fix them herself, no matter how much of her she gave them. And she didn’t want to see Will become a part of her past – he was too good for that. She deserved more.

Her chest tightens at the memory nonetheless – in shame, in defeat, in ruefulness – but she knows there is nothing she can do to fix the past. She can’t go back in time.

But Alana knows one way she can fix this.

She turns abruptly to face him, surprising herself so much that she cannot meet his eyes for a few seconds.

“What?” he asks, and she feels him palm her shoulder, rub his thumb over her bare collarbone, slide his hand up to the nape of her neck to stroke the soft place beneath her jaw.

“Nothing,” she says, and she kicks herself for devaluing what she had planned to say. “I mean,” she recovers lamely, feeling worse. With a herculean effort, she forces herself to meet Will’s eyes, and finds them patiently awaiting her words. He stares at her with the same longing as he had years ago, but this time, it is shrouded in something else – some guarded quality that hadn’t previously been in place. “Well,” she continues, trying desperately to grasp the shredded few strands of her thought together, staring at his confusing blue eyes, feeling his thumb draw circles on the skin of her jaw.

A word comes to her. It appears in her mind as quickly as _serene_ had, just moments ago, and she starts at its blaring blue light, which gleams in her mind’s eye like a beacon. It isn’t serenity she has been feeling all this time – nor is it calm or complacence. It is stability, and she knows just where it is coming from.

She looks back up at Will, who looks thoroughly confused, despite himself, and she rolls up on her toes and kisses him once, long and slow, waiting until his other hand finds its way to her waist, until their breath is hot and fast and Will’s hair looks as if he’d been caught in a wind tunnel. She waits until she cannot take his touch any more, and then she pulls back.

And she says, “You can stay with me, if you want. I’ve got extra room, and I already know how to take care of the dogs, and I wouldn’t mind it if you stayed.” It comes out fast. The air feels still when she finishes, so she adds, “I’d actually really, really like it if you stayed.”

Will’s expression is unreadable, and that is _frustrating._ His eyes are cloaked again, and his mouth hangs open in a way that suggests he is absorbed by his mind, lost in thought. So she waits like she has for three years, and she chews on her tongue, like she has with every other guy she’s dated since Will went away, keeping his secrets safe inside her.

“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Will says, and her heart leaps, because his voice isn’t rigid. “I couldn’t impose on you – not like this.”

“Like what?” she says, and she clasps Will’s shoulders tightly and she implores him with her eyes. “Will, you cannot say you are anything like you were. You’re not perfect, and you own more dogs than t-shirts at this point, but I know you. And I see you. And you’re nothing like what you used to be.”

He falters. “I just . . . don’t want to cause any trouble,” he says, and Alana follows him instantly.

“He won’t be there,” she assures him. Her voice is calm and sure and strong, and a balloon of pride inflates in her stomach. “He’s gone, and if he ever comes back, we’ll leave.”

“‘We’?” Will repeats, and Alana nods. “There’s a ‘we’ now?”

“If you want there to be,” she says. “I’d love it if there was.”

She watches nervously as Will looks back at his house, out at the parcel of land behind his house, farther out, at the sunrise. She feels like he must have all those years ago, waiting stark naked under government-issue prison lamps for him to make a decision.

He speaks, finally, and the sound is like water on the Sahara. “Are you sure you can handle seven dogs _and_ me?”


End file.
